Art Fair ‘Fatigue’ May Resolve Itself

By Scott Reyburn

Jan. 23, 2015

LONDON — Dealers and collectors have been complaining for years that there are too many art fairs. “Well, the heyday of art fairs seems to be over,” Skate’s Art Market Research proclaimed on Jan. 19, reporting that 1,032,792 people attended the world’s top 20 art fairs in 2014, a 7.4 percent decline from the previous year.

The Art Newspaper’s 2015 calendar lists 269 fairs, nine fewer than last year. An additional absentee, announced this month by the Florida-based organizers David and Lee Ann Lester, will be their American International Fine Art Fair, which specialized in traditional art and antiques.

Clearly something is beginning to give in the annual logjam of art fairs. The Skate’s report listed “fair fatigue” and the growth of online art trading among the factors explaining the contraction. In addition, tastes are changing: The Lesters cited an “80 percent shift” in the fine art market to Impressionist, modern and contemporary art for the demise of their event.

But there is also an even more seismic shift taking place in the art market, reflecting the widening income inequality charted by Oxfam, which reported on Jan. 19 that by next year the world’s richest 1 percent will own more wealth than that of the rest of the world’s population.

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‘‘Le Torero,’’ a 1989 painting of a man’s face by Bengt Lindstrom.CreditBoon Gallery

Art fairs, like auctions and dealer exhibitions, are polarizing into the “best” — which attract demand from that wealthy 1 percent — and the “rest,” which struggle to pull in discretionary spending from the financially squeezed professional classes. The widening gulf between the two could recently be seen at events in Europe.

The Brussels Art Fair, Brafa, definitely falls into the “best” category. The event, Belgium’s most prestigious fair devoted to pre-21st-century art and collectibles, is held in a stylishly reconfigured industrial building in the city’s northwest and was set to open to the public on Saturday, beginning eight days of celebration for its 60th anniversary.

A sort of smaller, less staid, if less international, version of Tefaf Maastricht, which runs from March 13 to 22 in the Netherlands, Brafa stimulatingly has dealers in medieval art next to French 18th-century furniture specialists next to tribal sculpture dealers next to modern art gallerists. More than 100 of the 126 exhibitors this year are from Belgium and France, with none from the United States or China. Last year’s fair attracted 55,000 visitors, the same number as the Frieze Art Fair in London.

Even with the eurozone’s economic problems, there are plenty of wealthy Europeans who have hung on to their money since the financial crisis of 2007-8. At Brafa, the Boon Gallery from Knokke-Heist, Belgium, quickly sold “Le Torero,” a monumental, expressionistic 1989 painting of a man’s face by the Swedish artist Bengt Lindstrom, for 40,000 euros, or about $45,000, to a Belgian collector at the V.I.P. preview on Wednesday.

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A 19th-century wooden head from the Fang culture of Gabon offered by the Montreal dealer Jacques Germain at the Brussels Arts Fair.CreditHughes Dubois

“We usually sell about 30 paintings priced between €10,000 and €75,000 at Brafa,” said Jos Boon, the gallery’s co-founder. “But then, we are playing at home.”

The Boon Gallery specializes in 19th- and 20th-century paintings, predominantly by Impressionist and modern Belgian artists. Walking around the fair at the preview, it soon became clear that Brafa’s picture dealers weren’t cutting many edges. If you wanted to buy a Bernard Buffet clown or a Marc Chagall violin-playing goat, this could be the event for you.

At the top end of the tribal art market, Jacques Germain of Montreal, who deals in African sculpture — a traditional strength of Belgium’s postcolonial gallery scene — was waiting to confirm a reserve on a rare and well-documented wooden head from Gabon’s admired Fang culture, priced at more than €500,000 at the preview.

“We keep our best pieces for Brafa,” Mr. Germain said. “There are eight good tribal art dealers at the fair, and that’s a bigger critical mass than at Tefaf.”

The London dealer Mullany is one of at least four dealers offering museum-quality European medieval objects, which continue to have a discreet but knowledgeable following among buyers from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.

“I’ve just seen three collectors who could buy anything on my booth,” said Nicholas Mullany, who owns the gallery. His stand-out object was a circa 1420 Austrian polychrome wooden sculpture of St. Agnes, priced at €295,000.

The night before Brafa’s V.I.P. preview, which culminated in a sit-down dinner for 1,566 guests, the London Art Fair held a more informal opening event for its 27th edition, which was held at the Business Design Center in Islington and concludes on Sunday.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, this fair, specializing in British modern and contemporary art, had a reputation as being the sort of event at which City of London bankers, traders and fund managers — many of whom live in the Georgian properties clustered nearby — would splash five- and six-figure sums from their annual bonuses.

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‘‘Vertical Composition in White,’’ a 1958 work by Adrian Heath.CreditJonathan Clark Fine Art

But postcrisis, the bonus pool has contracted, and so has spending. Higher-end dealers such as James Holland-Hibbert, Richard Green and Offer Waterman no longer participate, leaving this year’s 128 exhibitors to show a fairly homogenous mix of middling-quality works by “Modern British” staples such as Alan Davie, Patrick Heron and Keith Vaughan, plus decorative newer pieces by affordable homegrown contemporaries.

“There’s less top-end stock — you don’t see so many glamour pieces,” said Jamie Anderson of the dealership Waterhouse & Dodd, Mayfair, which was showing works by David Bomberg and Roger Hilton. “It could be difficult to sell a work for more than 50,000 pounds,” he added, looking at the hipster-heavy crush of twenty- and thirtysomethings quaffing free plastic glasses of Macallan whisky at the preview.

That said, the Chelsea-based dealer Jonathan Clark did manage to sell a painting priced at £60,000, or $90,000, about during the opening.

“Vertical Composition in White,” a pleasing, commercially sized 1958 work by Adrian Heath, an influential figure in British post-war abstraction, was bought by a collector from New York.

“We do get Americans buying British postwar,” Mr. Clark said. “It can look good next to Abstract Expressionism, and it’s a lot less expensive.”

Mr. Clark added that the Islington event had changed in recent years.

“We used to take a lot of money in the 2000s,” he said. “The problem now is people can’t get high-quality stock, and there aren’t enough good dealers in modern British art.”

In other words, the wealthiest art buyers now want to buy only the best, and those with less money don’t want — or can’t afford — to buy the rest. Given time, this could well reduce the problem of there being too many art fairs.